My News Day events in Sweden, October 2011

I seem to have spent most of the last few weeks away. But I have been working most of the time. I recently presented at the My News Day events for the company My News Desk in Sweden – three days of events in three cities – a great achievement for the firm, and fabulously well organised. I spoke on the attributes of influencers and the best techniques for measuring engagement with influencers online. You can access a copy of my presentation from the MyNewsDesk site.

One of the many insights that was highlighted by the events was that use of social media and engines of communication is actually improved through sharing of tactics and tools. Keeping methods to yourself may seem to make sense – a first mover advantage, as Porter would have it. But in reality, the hoarding of tools and measurement resources only weakens your position as a company in the social business landscape. Adam Vincenzini illustrated this when he pointed out that most large-views YouTube videos will show a graph of views over time as well as providing information about referrals to video content, audience breakdown and discovery events. Competitors can see all this data unless you switch this information off – yet almost no-one knows this feature exists in Youtube. This kind of useful information needs to be shared for business representatives to understand the paths taken to consumer content. And unless you can compare your experiences with other organisations you really have no concept of your social strategy success.

Additionally Jonathan Bean noted that the physical world and the digital world need to be connected. If social strategies don’t link to offline behaviours and other opportunities to connect (offline goes online, goes offline, goes online), then the reach and relevance of any social strategy will inevitably be limited. This goes for content as much as tools and tactics. Social business needs this reality check of the offline or at least the ‘real world’ in order to properly engage online.